What is Mistral even Becoming?
Mistral, Gemma and others show OpenAI's time is limited.
Hey Everyone,
Many moons ago the threat of open-source was passed around somewhere inside of Google. The engineer went on to state that the “third faction” posing a competitive threat to Google and OpenAI was the open-source community. Now those warnings have come into reality in February, 2024.
Mistral Large
Undisclosed levels of funding from Microsoft
Le Chat
Now there’s Mistral, Meta’s Llama, Microsoft’s Phi-2 and Google’s Gemma, among so many others. Open-source is evolving faster than commercial closed AI. Before we get Llama-3, Mistral is also evolving.
Paris-based AI startup Mistral AI is launching a new flagship large language model called Mistral Large. When it comes to reasoning capabilities, it is designed to rival other top-tier models, such as GPT-4 and Claude 2.
Microsoft Deal
Microsoft has announced a new multiyear partnership with Mistral, a French AI startup that’s valued at €2 billion (about $2.1 billion). The Financial Times reports that the partnership will include Microsoft taking a minor stake in the 10-month-old AI company, just a little over a year after Microsoft invested more than $10 billion (actually around $13 Billion) into its OpenAI partnership. It’s unbelievable!
The deal will see Mistral’s open and commercial language models available on Microsoft’s Azure AI platform, the second company to offer a commercial language model on Azure after OpenAI.
Le Chat
In addition to Mistral Large, the startup is also launching its own alternative to ChatGPT with a new service called Le Chat. This chat assistant is currently available in beta. I’d be interested to try Le Chat on Groq.
This news is just 2 hours old at the time of writing:
Mistral is going to be valued at a lot more than $2 Billion now.
Paris France is Suddenly the Generative AI Mecca
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🔮 Mistral is Officially OpenAI Best Competitor 🚀
Fluent in English, French, Spanish, German, and Italian
32K tokens context window
Instruction-following
Natively capable of function calling
Top performance in Math & Coding
Supports function calling & JSON format
Fluent in English, French, Spanish, German, and Italian.
“The uncomfortable truth is, we aren’t positioned to win this arms race and neither is OpenAI. While we’ve been squabbling, a third faction has been quietly eating our lunch,” the engineer wrote. - The fabled Google Engineer
Google, Meta, Microsoft have no Moat - the New Wave is Coming
Access here: https://chat.mistral.ai
Read More: https://mistral.ai/news/mistral-large/
Mistral Large, Mistral’s new flagship model
Mistral Large is their new cutting-edge text generation model. It reaches top-tier reasoning capabilities. It can be used for complex multilingual reasoning tasks, including text understanding, transformation, and code generation.
No Priors Ep. 40 | With Arthur Mensch, CEO Mistral AI
Le Chat
The Best Ex Google AI Company?
Founded by alums from Google’s DeepMind and Meta, Mistral AI originally positioned itself as an AI company with an open-source focus. While Mistral AI’s first model was released under an open-source license with access to model weights, that’s not the case for its larger models.
Mistral along with Meta’s Llama-2 (and forthcoming Llama-3) have positioned themselves uniquely among the open-source leaders. Soon there will be less incentives for companies to use the models of OpenAI.
For Microsoft this is also about appearances and anti-competitive lawsuit deterrence. This open partnership strategy is a nice way to keep its Azure customers in its product ecosystem. It might also help when it comes to anticompetitive scrutiny. Microsoft have already made so much money with their Copilots and early access to GPT-4, they are covering their bases.
By partnering with Meta and Mistral, Microsoft is playing coy with regulators.
All of this also makes OpenAI less relevant.
Augmenting European AI
Microsoft said in a statement that it was investing in Mistral that is now worth 2 billion euro ($2.1 billion), 10-month-old business to help it unlock “new commercial opportunities” and expand to global markets, without providing further financial details. If Mistal has a $2 Billion valuation it’s likely Microsoft invested at least $400 million in the startup I’d estimate. After all the startup is only 10 months old.
This definately does try to appease European regulators, though Microsoft’s President was evasive about it in an interview today. Microsoft is also investing in Europe and Germany in particular (3.2 Billion euros) in a big way, perhaps to appease EU regulators too. It’s not clear if any of that trickles down into Aleph Alpha, Germany’s best foundational model maker.
Why Mistral Competes with OpenAI
Mistral AI’s business model looks more and more like OpenAI’s business model as the company offers Mistral Large through a paid API with usage-based pricing.
Under the deal, Mistral’s large language models (LLM) — the technology behind generative AI products — will be available on Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform, becoming only the second company to host its LLM on the platform after OpenAI.
Alongside Mistral Large, Mistral also released a new optimised model, Mistral Small, optimised for latency and cost. Mistral Small outperforms Mixtral 8x7B and has lower latency, which makes it a refined intermediary solution between our open-weight offering and our flagship model.
Mistral Small benefits from the same innovation as Mistral Large regarding RAG-enablement and function calling.
Microsoft thinks Generative AI might be one of the defining technologies of this decade.
Microsoft President Brad Smith said on Monday that the deal was an “important” signal of the company’s backing of European technology.
Mistral’s benchmarks give a comprehensive view of performance/cost tradeoffs.
By default, Mistral AI supports context windows of 32k tokens (generally more than 20,000 words in English). Mistral Large supports English, French, Spanish, German and Italian.
Microsoft will reportedly take a minor stake in Mistral AI, according to the Financial Times. It’s not clear just how “minor” that could possibly be with this $2 Billion valuation Mistral has reached.
This might also be the point where Mistral becomes more like OpenAI and less about the open-source movement in particular. The temptation to compete with OpenAI directly is too big of an opportunity to pass up by these ambitious young French AI engineers and ex Google Brain and Google DeepMind folk.
Mistral is a fun young brand with a different energy than OpenAI, who feel very much like Silicon Valley.
Mistral AI claims that it ranks second after GPT-4 based on several benchmarks. But how much can we trust these leaderboards anyways?
All of this of course comes as Microsoft is facing pressure from EU antitrust regulators over its reported $13 billion investment in San Francisco-based OpenAI. So Mistral is a bit of a hot air balloon for Microsoft trying to appease Europe is a funny hidden meme in this story. This makes after OpenAI and Anthropic, Mistral one of the best funded Generative AI startups on the planet in 2024 I believe.
Smith said the investment in Mistral AI would also see funds dedicated to research and development, including AI models for public sector services in Europe.
It’s a fascinating even in the history of Generative AI was have witnessed today February 26th, 2024. I guess this will have to go out tomorrow, but I’ll keep it as a free article for a change on this Newsletter.
What is Mistral even Becoming in 2024?
Keep in mind, Mistral is only like a 9 month old startup or something like that. It’s raised $2.5 Billion already to date this means.
We knew 2024 would be a big year for open-source AI, I just didn’t realize Mistral was going to become more like OpenAI in terms of its business model. Basically it will take over in Europe, people won’t trust OpenAI compared to Mistral.
“It’s important for us to show that this isn’t just about Microsoft technology, it’s not just about American products. This is going to be an engine for technology, innovation and growth in Europe as well,” - Brad Smith.
American Billionaires have been pushing Paris’s AI scene to help rejuvenate Europe’s AI future and also push American-friendly values on to their scene.
Big Takeaway
Mistral has a Microsoft investment to help commercialize its new AI language models.
And well, it’s pretty massive - almost like a Microsoft bribe of EU regulators, very bizarre.
Mistral claims only OpenAI beats its model.
Better than Anthropic?
Better than Google Gemini Ultra? (no that’s not part of this leaderboard graph).
GPT-5 and Gemini Ultra should be the baseline. Mistral is comparing itself with older or smaller models.
View Careers at Mistral here: https://jobs.lever.co/mistral
Mistral Large is available on Mistral’s own infrastructure, hosted in Europe, or through Azure AI Studio and Azure Machine Learning.
Mistral Small will also be available today, offering improved latency over Mistral’s 8x7B model.
What do you make of all of this?
Congrats to Arthur Mensch Guillaume Lample Timothee Lacroix Theophile Gervet Devendra Chaplot Christopher Bamford Lucile Saulnier and the rest of team Mistral AI. You are officially important people in AI.
More Insights
Mistral is in the area of 20% cheaper than GPT-4.
Academics and Machine learning scientists figure that since answers are *very* similar to GPT-4, this might indicate that Mistral-Large has been trained on a synthetic dataset generated by GPT-4.
Mistral Large Mistral Large has top-tier reasoning capacities with a pre-trained model that has 81.2% accuracy on MMLU.
Mistral is one of the most impressive companies founded in 2023 in Artificial Intelligence and the fastest moving foundational model builder outside of China so far.
Visit Mistral docs for more technical info:
Paris was always a tech hub. Excellent decision. Estonia and France will be the leading tech forces in the EU.